We’re Living Different Moments—At the Same Time

A young woman wearing a hooded coat and knit scarf stands on a wet city street at night, with buildings and streetlights in the background.

The end of the year and holiday season can be a complicated time. In a culture that romanticizes this season, it’s easy to feel pressured to act or feel a certain way. And that pressure can blind us to the important truth that while we’re all in the same season, we’re not living the same moment.

We’re all experiencing it differently, even as we move through it together.

We’re all taking turns passing through the many dimensions of being human.

When I’m in my darkest hour, your deepest dream might be coming true. When I’m indulging in a joyful holiday gathering, you might be quietly enduring the season with a shattered heart.

This isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system.
It’s what it means to be alive alongside others who are living their own experience.

This time of year carries an expected emotional tone. It sets us up to compare—either comparing our experience to someone else’s, or comparing our reality to our ideas about how things should be. Those comparisons can leave us pressured, disconnected, lonely or ashamed. But the reality is, there’s no single emotional storyline for this time of year.

Maybe you’re being told this is a time to be grateful, but you’re grieving.
Maybe everyone around you is celebrating, and you’re just trying to get through the day.
Maybe your family gatherings will feel warm and lovely, while someone else’s will reopen old wounds.

One of the healthiest things we can do during a tender season like this is make room for it to be what it is—raw, messy, or entirely mundane. And to release the internal pressure that makes us forget we’re each having a unique experience in every moment.

Recognizing this invites empathy and open-heartedness—toward others, yes, but also toward ourselves. It loosens the stories about what should be happening or what it’s supposed to feel like.

Letting ourselves be where we are, without forcing or judging, makes it easier to let others be where they are. When we offer ourselves permission and grace, we naturally extend it outward. And when we release the assumption that things should look or feel a certain way—for ourselves or anyone else—we move closer to the simple truth that everyone is living their own story.

When Life Stops Making Sense

Elderly man in a suit and red tie wearing headphones, smiling with eyes closed, dancing with one arm raised against a plain background.

There are times in life when the ground beneath us shifts, and the things that once felt steady or certain suddenly stop making sense. When the certainties we once trusted in no longer apply, and the familiar meanings we’ve built our lives around begin to unravel, we find ourselves in a space that can feel both empty and full of possibility.

This is what I think of as a crisis of meaning—the crossroads where I so often meet the people I have the privilege to walk with in therapy.

Crises of meaning test the strength of the frameworks that help us understand who we are and why we’re here. They ask: What can you still hold onto when everything else feels uncertain? Sometimes, the answer is: nothing. Sometimes, bouncing back and rejoining life as usual is no longer an option.  

At their most useful, crises of meaning are portals. They break us open so we can grow into new, more expansive versions of ourselves. At their most damaging, they can cause us to collapse inward, disengaging from others, losing interest in what once mattered, or losing trust in life itself.

These crises don’t only emerge from catastrophe. They often arise through life’s natural turning points: aging, parenthood, loss, illness, or major decisions that alter our path. They can also appear quietly, when the life we’ve built no longer feels like our own.

I’ve lived through one myself. When I battled cancer a decade ago, while first building my practice, the meaning I’d built my life around began to crumble. I realized that I was being pressed to reexamine what I valued, how I worked, and what I gave my energy to. That experience reshaped the foundation of how I live and work today. Because of that crisis of meaning, I envisioned and then designed a more grounded, spacious, and integrated life. 

Over the years, I’ve gotten to walk with many people through their own similar transformations. There was the new mom who realized her high-paying executive job, once a marker of success, had begun to feel completely soulless. Her crisis of meaning pushed her to walk away from her career and build a life centered on what she found truly nourishing: her creative passions and her family.
There was also the middle-aged man, haunted for decades by his fear of dying, who had a near-death experience and emerged from it with a newfound peace. His crisis led him to get certified as a death doula, accompanying others at the end of life with compassion and grace.

Creating meaning is one of our most defining human capacities. We can’t help but interpret our experiences, weaving stories that help us understand who we are and what our lives are about. When the meaning that once steadied us no longer fits, we’re given a chance to look again—to revise the story with greater honesty and intention. That’s what makes these moments so profoundly transformative.

A crisis of meaning can be a rupture, yes; but it can also be a rebirth. It can serve as a reminder that meaning isn’t something we find out there; it’s something we continually create. We can learn to meet life’s unexpected turns with curiosity rather than resistance. And we can  recognize that when things stop making sense, it may be life’s way of calling us closer to what’s real.

Stability in the Storm: Finding Your Inner Anchor

There’s no question that the times we’re living in are harder than we’d like them to be. The collective energy feels tense, uncertain, and uncomfortable. Everywhere we turn, we see evidence of our world in a massive state of flux. Under these circumstances, the future often feels like a big question mark. It’s easy, in the face of such instability, to feel shaken or overwhelmed. And that’s exactly why it’s so essential to find a source of stability that doesn’t depend on external circumstances aligning just right. But how do we do that? Where do we turn? The first place is inward. Because when life isn’t offering us the stability we crave, it’s time to create our own. 

The thought of having to generate stability from within might seem daunting, especially in such exhausting times. But the practice of it doesn’t have to be. In fact, developing a deep inner anchoring process is a series of several small and manageable steps. There are three key ways we can find internal stability and anchor ourselves: through our bodies, our minds, and our lives. Each of these provides a powerful foundation we can lean on, no matter how unpredictable, chaotic, or destructive things may get around us.

Anchor Through the Body

The first step in navigating times of instability is learning to regulate our nervous systems and connect with sensation. Grounding ourselves in our physical bodies helps us stay anchored in the present moment. When we’re centered, we become like bamboo bending in the wind—resilient in the face of life’s turbulence. Practices that encourage us to return to our bodies help us shift out of self-protective states like fight/flight/freeze—responses that kick in when we feel threatened or overwhelmed. As we soothe our nervous system through bodily practices, fear and anxiety naturally begin to subside. We become more responsive and less reactive to the world, seeing and processing things more clearly, and approaching life with curiosity, flexibility, and calm.

Anchor Through the Mind

Once we’ve cultivated a sense of stability in our bodies, we can turn our attention to our minds. Our thoughts play a significant role in either grounding us or throwing us into even more unmanageability. Challenging unhelpful thinking patterns, practicing problem-solving, and exploring new perspectives are all ways we can create mental anchors. When the world feels uncertain, engaging intentionally with our thoughts and beliefs can make all the difference. By doing this, we gain the power to shift our mindset and find stability within, no matter what’s going on around us.

Anchor Through Our Lives

The final frontier of internal anchoring is found in how we live our daily lives. When the world feels chaotic, it can be incredibly stabilizing to focus on what’s directly within our control. This might mean cultivating meaningful relationships, getting involved in our communities, or making choices that align with our deepest values. In uncertain times, being purposeful and intentional about how we show up in our own lives offers an anchor of its own. Working on this level helps us stay grounded through the instability we experience in the larger world, offering us direction and peace in the process.

The Power of Internal Anchors

Whether we’re anchoring through our bodies, minds, or lives, we stand to gain immense stability by turning inward instead of relying on outside circumstances. In times of upheaval, this is not only the best thing we can do; it’s the only thing we can do to find a real sense of sturdiness. By cultivating our internal anchors, we give ourselves the foundation we need to weather the storms that come our way.

 

Why Resting is Revolutionary

If I had to guess, I’d say that in most conversations between two adults in the Western World, at least one of the people will utter the word “busy” to describe how they’re doing. This state of being—or, rather, of constantly doing—is so common and so pervasive, that it’s often what we lead with when speaking about our lives. Sometimes, we say it with exhaustion, like a quiet admission of feeling trapped by all our obligations. Other times, we wear it like a badge of honor—proof of our productivity, importance, or success. Either way, we say it a lot. And, for the most part, it’s true. 

In our fast-paced, industrialized, capitalist society, productivity is praised above all else. We’re trained to be more like human doings than human beings, and we often have an unreasonable number of demands on our time. The pressure to produce is immense, and what it takes to survive—let alone to achieve or acquire more, as most of us have been taught to do—just keeps increasing, so that we never feel like we’re doing enough. 

With this as our backdrop, the act of rest becomes revolutionary. To commit to slowing down, unplugging, setting aside the task list, and allowing ourselves to do nothing is a radical act in a world that has taught us to conflate our productivity with our worth. But prioritizing rest isn’t just about subverting societal norms. For many of us, it’s also about challenging things we learned in our childhood about resting—that it means you’re lazy, for example, or that you can only rest once you’ve earned it. Because of all the things we’ve been taught to believe about it, rest can feel like a selfish or slothful indulgence, rather than a necessity. 

Sometimes, resting is not only difficult because of what’s going on in our minds, but also because of what’s going on in our bodies. It is often the case that slowing down and attempting to shift from the doing mode to the being mode feels uncomfortable or even unpleasant. Some of us grew up in chaotic, unpredictable environments, where our nervous systems were shaped for vigilance. Letting our guard down to rest can feel exposing, even unsafe. Or, it can feel boring and under-stimulating, because we’re so unaccustomed to being in the present moment that attempting to rest in the here-and-now feels like torture. 

Rest is a natural and fundamental state for any living being. Yet, our culture has shaped us to perceive it in layered, emotionally charged, and overly complicated ways. The customary way of life in our culture places legitimate barriers in the way of us resting as much as we need to. And, if we aren’t mindful, we can participate in building our own barriers to it.. This is why we must become revolutionaries when it comes to rest. Rest isn’t a luxury; it’s a reclaiming of what’s most natural. If we want to truly live—and not just survive—we must teach ourselves to honor the deep truth found in nature: that we can only be as active as we are rested. 

Waking Up From the Dream of Unworthiness

In almost 20 years of doing therapy, I’ve come to discover a few universal threads that weave themselves through all our lives. Whenever I take a step back and look at the experiences of my clients as a window into what it means to be human, I always get brought back to one consistent theme: the belief in our brokenness. Over and over, in almost every single therapeutic process I get to be part of, I see traces of that common core belief. Through many intimate conversations over many years, I’ve come to discover that this belief about our unworthiness is more common than any of us realize.

The belief that we are unworthy, that we are not enough, takes root very early in our lives. Before we have the conscious ability to thoughtfully reach this conclusion, we unconsciously determine that it must be true. There are evolutionary reasons for this. As defenseless, dependent beings, children quickly grasp how little control they have over their world. But what’s one thing they can control? Themselves. This is where the belief in unworthiness begins—because if I am the problem, then maybe I can be the solution.

If I assume that I’m the reason my needs aren’t being met; the reason my parents seem so exhausted and overwhelmed; the reason my siblings are getting everyone’s attention; the reason things feel so scary and unpredictable, then maybe I can do something about it. I can make sure to make others happy with me, so I don’t give them anything else to worry about. I can hold back my needs and try not to bother anyone, so I don’t make things worse. 

As it turns out, believing there’s something wrong with us was, at one point, a strategy for survival. But over time, this belief takes root inside us and starts to influence the way we see ourselves, the way we carry ourselves, and the way we engage with others. 

At some point in the therapy process, almost every single person I’ve ever worked with comes into contact with an unworthiness belief. Usually, when it comes out, it’s attached to a second core belief: one that’s equally damaging, equally scary, equally common, and equally untrue. Not only do most of us deal with believing there’s something wrong with us, we also believe that we’re the only ones dealing with it. The thought process tends to go a little like this:

There’s something deeply, fundamentally wrong with me. And if others knew how broken/damaged/undeserving/unlovable I actually am, they wouldn’t want anything to do with me. 

That’s a pretty painful thing to walk around believing, isn’t it? Yet so many of us are walking around this way, cut off from each other out of fear and shame. And while we’re all playing small and safe, hiding and performing so that nobody catches on to our unworthiness or brokenness, we fail to see the universal quality of our condition. We fail to see that actually, we’re all in this together. I can’t help but smile when I touch on this ironic truth that emerges from the work I get to do with people. The only thing that’s really wrong with us is the belief that there’s something wrong with us. And one of the biggest reasons we feel alone is that we’re keeping each other at a distance, already believing we’re alone in our experience. It’s interesting to consider that if we all could just recognize how universal this core belief is, we could stop feeling so shut down, fearful, and ashamed around each other. We could let ourselves be fully and imperfectly human, understanding that all we’re surrounded by are other imperfect humans. 

Waking up from the dream of unworthiness is a vital step on the path toward personal growth and transformation. It’s a process of

  • healing the child within, who did the best they could with what they had, 
  • coming into a more gracious, loving, and accepting relationship with ourselves,
  • choosing who we wish to be in each moment, rather than continuing to run on old, outdated programs,
  • being generous in our interpretations of others’ actions, understanding that it’s easier to be forgiving of others’ flaws when we are accepting of our own.

Most importantly, it’s a process of entering a state of awareness that allows us to be fully connected to ourselves and others. In this way, waking up from the dream of unworthiness isn’t just about healing, it’s about freedom—the freedom to discover that we were never broken or alone to begin with.

 

Conscious Motherhood: The Subtle Yet Profound Art of Parenting With Awareness

A woman with curly hair holds a sleeping child close to her chest, both seated. The woman has a thoughtful expression, and the background includes a blurred indoor setting.

Any mother can attest to the fact that their child’s development—especially in the early months and years—is of paramount importance. Rare is the day that goes by without focusing on milestones, looking for subtle changes, or marveling over new skills unlocked. For a child, the developmental process is monumental. For a mother, it’s extremely important, too.

Motherhood, like childhood, is a process of becoming. Moment by moment, day by day, mothers are shaped by the experience of raising a child. As they move through the steep learning curve of parenting, they evolve and expand into their new identity. This happens automatically, as a natural function of adapting to the new role and taking on the ever-changing responsibilities of parenting. But there’s a different, more deliberate way to move through this process that’s on offer for those who choose to approach it this way. This is the path of the conscious mother.

Being a conscious mother means approaching motherhood with intentionality and deliberateness. It means bringing a mindful presence to the process of parenting, aiming to be congruent in your intentions, words, and actions when engaging with your children. Most importantly, it means navigating your role as mother with as much awareness as possible, attuning to your children as you remain attuned to yourself.

What Conscious Motherhood Can Offer the Child
One of the cornerstones of conscious motherhood is presence. It’s about aiming to be fully engaged and attentive during conversations, moments of play, and times of discipline and redirection. The conscious mother aspires to bring mindful attention and awareness into each interaction, fostering a deeper connection between mother and child. Understanding the importance of their children’s emotional world, conscious mothers strive to be validating, accepting, consistent, compassionate, and responsive with their children. In this way, they provide a foundation for their children that serves as a source of emotional safety and security. The hope is that by internalizing this experience of safety, the child will develop qualities such as stability, resilience, attachment security, emotional intelligence, and self-confidence.

What Conscious Motherhood Can Offer the Mother
The benefits of this parenting style aren’t only for the child; the mother is also positively shaped by the experience of conscious motherhood. By making intentional and values-aligned parenting choices, the conscious mother can experience a stabilizing sense of congruence. Most importantly, the experience of parenting with conscious awareness offers an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of inner experiences such as reactive patterns, unhealed wounds, internalized beliefs and expectations about parenting, fears and anxieties, and projections. Choosing to be cognizant of their inner world and its influence on the way they parent, conscious mothers get to grow through the process of nurturing their children. They add emotional and even spiritual depth to the process of parenting, which positively influences them, their children, and their relationships. Engaging in conscious mothering can contribute to improved overall well-being for mothers, promoting a sense of fulfillment and purpose in the parenting role that can lead to greater satisfaction and happiness.

Given the already challenging nature of parenting in our hectic and high-paced world, the prospect of developing a conscious approach can seem daunting. But those who wish to venture on this path can start with small and simple practices, like the ones below.

Five Simple Ways to Start Practicing Conscious Mothering

  1. Use interactions with your child as a mindfulness practice.
  2. Work with a therapist to bring conscious awareness into your experience of mothering.
  3. Keep a journal that you write in daily or multiple times per week, using it to check in with yourself and reflect on your thoughts, feelings, and observations—pertaining to the process of parenting, and in general.
  4. Take time to reflect on your parenting choices and identify the personal values or beliefs that guide them.
  5. Thoughtfully embody and model the behaviors and ways of being you wish for your child to adopt.

Are You Coping or Copping Out?

therapy

“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”

These words, commonly attributed to the late American actress, Katharine Hepburn, are a bit of a downer. But they’re also unquestionably, inevitably true. As beautiful as it may be, life really is hard. And in the absence of a clear instruction manual, it can sometimes feel like we’re stumbling more than striving as we make our way through it. Each one of us, without exception, is bound to encounter hardship at some point in life. But we don’t all experience our adversities in the same way. While some of us are crippled by our struggles, others approach them as catalysts for growth.

Undoubtedly, life’s difficulties come in various magnitudes and degrees of devastation. But those that don’t kill us must somehow be dealt with, one way or another. Between the time we’re born and the time we die, there’s a space of time in which we encounter, interpret, and respond to what we experience. Most people, at least the ones I talk to, hope to not only survive life, but to thrive within the time they’re given. And though a fortunate few people are able to thrive without effort, the rest of us have to work toward that ambition.

When it comes right down to it, the difference between fully thriving and merely surviving is how we deal with our circumstances. What do we do in the face of the tough stuff? Do we cope, or do we cop out? Now, before you accuse me of being insensitive to the plight of the disadvantaged or those heavily burdened by matter of genetics, upbringing, or circumstance, let me clarify a couple of things. When I refer to coping, I’m talking about what happens when we acknowledge our difficulties and take responsibility for responding to them in order to mitigate the struggle and alleviate our distress. When I say copping out, I’m referring to what happens when we avoid or deny our struggles, bypass the feelings they bring up, and attempt to evade our responsibility for dealing with them. No matter how difficult our lives might be, all of us have the choice to either cope or cop out. And, in reality, it’s one of the only options any of us really have. So, how can you tell which one you’re doing?

If you’re coping . . .

  • You acknowledge and accept that life isn’t all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.
  • You recognize what you’re feeling and do what you can to work through it.
  • You own that while much of life is out of your control, how you respond to it isn’t.
  • You take responsibility for facing what’s in front of you, and you find a way to deal with it.
  • You ask for support when you need it.
  • You take care of yourself when life’s got you down.
  • You find ways to create a sense of meaning out of the difficulties you encounter.
  • You use your struggles as a source of strength.

If you’re copping out . . .

  • You avoid or downplay your difficulties.
  • You routinely blame circumstances or other people for how you feel.
  • You react impulsively to challenges and don’t reflect on those reactions afterward.
  • You bypass or suppress painful emotions when they come up.
  • You deny or resist support when you need it.
  • You try to push through, push stuff down, and pretend like everything’s fine when it isn’t.
  • You tell yourself that your struggles aren’t important and your emotions don’t matter.
  • You feel like a victim of life, with no options other than to endure it.

Whichever category you think you fall into, know that there’s no value judgment attached to it. You’re not a superior person if you cope, nor a bad one if you tend to cop out. Instead of judging or comparing yourself according to how you deal with life’s difficulties, consider reflecting on how you’d prefer to do it. If you want to become the kind of person who copes and creates meaning when the going gets tough, make that a daily intentional practice. Look for inspiration in the stories of people who overcame tremendous adversity and found a way to flourish. Viktor Frankl, one of those people whose story of resilience is an example for us all, offered a profound reminder for any of us who want to do more coping than copping out:

“Everything can be taken from a (wo)man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Is Self-Hypnosis a Super-Power?

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When most of us think of hypnosis, our minds tend to conjure particular scenes: a timepiece swinging from side to side; someone quacking like a duck for an audience’s amusement; a hypnotist creepily half-whispering some version of, “You’re getting sleeepyyy.” These classic images of hypnosis embedded in our collective consciousness give the practice a really bad rap. But the truth is, hypnosis—or hypnotherapy, as it’s referred to when practiced in clinical settings—has a number of practical benefits to offer. Research supports the use of hypnosis for everything from smoking cessation to weight loss. It’s been shown to yield powerful results for people dealing with panic attacks, sleep disturbances, chronic pain, low self-esteem, and much more. In short, the real practice of hypnosis is nothing like the dramatized versions we’ve been shown on television and stage shows. It’s a true healing practice, and the reason it works so well is far less spooky than you might imagine. 

Hypnosis, in essence, is all about connection. It’s a way of crossing over boundaries that tend to separate us from ourselves, others, and the world in general. When these boundaries are dissolved through hypnosis, the wisdom of the body and the unconscious mind can be recruited to generate powerful changes. Often, our attempts to create change at the conscious level only wind up getting us more stuck. For example, people with insomnia who try hard to fall asleep will usually discover that those well-intentioned, perfectly reasonable efforts only keep them more awake. But the truth is, the body and unconscious mind know precisely how to drift into deep sleep; and if the conscious mind gets out of the way, they’ll do it with ease. So that’s where hypnosis comes in—and, more specifically, where self-hypnosis comes in. 

Self-hypnosis is a practice we can all adopt to help us get more relaxed, sleep better, manage pain more effectively, and cope with mental and emotional challenges that arise throughout the day. The practice, which shares some things in common with meditation, can give us access to our own healing super-powers. By learning how to dissolve boundaries and create connections, we can access the extraordinary wisdom of our unconscious minds and bodies. 

The practice of self-hypnosis allows us to enter a flow state, in which changes can happen effortlessly and spontaneously. It helps us come back to the balanced state that is our true nature. Hypnosis isn’t some form of sorcery, as those classic images would have us believe, but it does help us tap into the magic that we carry around inside of us—the magic that helps us heal ourselves. 

Anyone can learn to hypnotize themselves; all it takes is a few simple tools and a little practice. If you’re intrigued, or think you could benefit from what self-hypnosis has to offer, join me at Innergy Meditation on Friday, January 18th from 7:30p.m. – 9:30p.m., and learn how you can Unleash Your Inner Healer Through Self-Hypnosis. I hope to see you there!

Mindfully Transitioning to 2019

not alone

In our culture, the end of the year is a time for slowing down, celebrating, spending time with loved ones, looking back on the previous 12 months, and building anticipation for what’s to come. This time of transition from one year to the next can offer us a peaceful and contemplative space from which to reflect, integrate, dream, and create. But as it goes with everything, we’ve got to be intentional and focus our attention if we want to harness and maximize this special year-end energy. Here are a few simple ways to ride the wave of mindfulness from this year into the next: 

  • Stay Consistent With Your Routines. The holidays bring a welcome disruption to the normal routine. For many of us, this time of year means time off from work, celebrations with loved ones, and indulgences of the food and beverage variety. And though it feels good to deviate from the norm, it also tends to make mindfulness a bit more difficult. If you find yourself ending the year feeling foggy and groggy, it’s a good sign that some daily routines and rituals are in order. Whether you hit the gym, meditate, take a walk outside, pray, write in your journal, or perform some other meaningful ritual, maintaining a sense of consistency in your end-of-year days will set you up to make the transition into next year much more consciously and smoothly.
  • Carve Out Some You Time. If your social calendar tends to be a bit fuller than usual around this time of year, it’s a good idea to create time for connecting with yourself. Having the energy of so many people around can be dizzying, making it hard to focus or find your center. It isn’t uncommon for people to make the new-year transition from a place of pure exhaustion; the demands of the holidays and the many social obligations that tend to crop up around this time can be truly overwhelming! But with some awareness and effort, it’s possible to strike a helpful balance and maximize your enjoyment as well as your emotional and energetic wellbeing. Make sure to make time for being alone, silent and still. Even a few mindful minutes can go a long way in helping you center yourself and prepare to consciously transition into a new year of possibilities. 
  • Make Peace With What’s Passed.To bring more mindfulness into this time of transition, thoughtfully consider the previous 12 months and reflect on what you’ve learned and what you’d like to bring with you into the new year. Spend some time considering what you experienced in 2018, highlighting those experiences that brought about new awarenesses and understandings. Contemplate the relationships that began, as well as those that ended. Recall your successes and your failures, your joys and your sorrows. Find a way to honor the year and make peace with it. You can do this by writing in your journal, sharing with a friend, going through a visualization exercise, or coming up with a ritual that’s all your own. Whatever way you choose to make peace with the year that’s passed, be sure to stay present to the intention to release the energy of the past year and create space for everything that will manifest in the year to come.
  • Focus on the Being (—Not Just the Doing). Whether you get pumped up about setting new year’s resolutions or shudder at the thought of it, it’s nice to mindfully generate a sense of purpose and intention at the start of a new year, so you can fulfill those resolutions you set or simply enjoy the ride. To shape the year ahead with mindfulness, focus your attention on how you’d like to be, as well as on what you plan to do. In other words, reflect on the energy you’d like to bring into the year, and think about the inner experiences you’d like to cultivate. You might, for example, set the intention to be wholehearted in your endeavors, present in your day-to-day activities, trusting in your intimate relationships, and kind to yourself. You might commit to experiencing more joy, more peace, or more openness. By focusing on how you want to be and what you want to experience, you’ll be flowing into the new year with a sense of purpose that isn’t dependent on external circumstances and doesn’t require you to sustain your January 1st motivation all year long. You’ll be rooted in clear intention and connected to a sense of what you want to create within you—and from this place, there’s nothing you can’t do!

Here’s to a peaceful close to 2018 and a beautiful start to 2019. May your transition be made mindfully, and may the year ahead expand and evolve you in wonderful ways. 

8 Simple Hacks for Happiness

a woman jumping in the air on a bridge.

As a mental health professional, I’m often faced with questions about how to reduce suffering; how to manage tough transitions; and, perhaps most often, how to experience real happiness. As it turns out, it’s this third question that people tend to struggle with the most. For so many of us, happiness is an ideal we’ve been sold on that’s so transient and elusive as to make us wonder whether it exists at all. We all want it, but most of us have no idea where to find it.

When we’re young, happiness is much easier to access, so much more lasting an experience. But as time goes on and our responsibilities and obligations increase, happiness tends to register far less frequently on our emotional radar. Why is this, and what can we do about it?

What I’ve learned in my years of practicing therapy and studying the science of happiness and wellbeing is that happiness is—as the worn-out cliché suggests—about the journey, not the destination. It’s an experience that we cultivate in the day-to-day encounters of our lives—one that we’re capable of creating at will and get to experience more vividly the more we conjure it. There are many ways to harness happiness and hack your brain to experience it more often; here are eight.

1. Smile for “no reason.” It might sound silly, but this one really works wonders. Research shows that when your body works the muscles that form a smile, a signal gets sent to your brain, letting it know that you’re happy. But don’t’ rely on the research; try this out for yourself. Chances are, the more you smile, the better you’ll feel—and, of course, the better you feel, the more you’ll smile. Before you know it, you’ll have generated a fun feedback loop that sparks happiness for you and everyone you meet. We’re hardwired to respond to nonverbal forms of communication, and smiles are the universal language for connection, joy, and positive vibes. As you practice smiling for no reason at all, you’ll see more smiling faces around you. And if those faces continue to move through the world transmitting that positive energy, you’ll have created a ripple effect of happiness; not only will you be happier, but the world will be that much happier, too. Put this little trick in practice, and you’ll be off to a fabulous start.

2. Practice kindness. Let’s be real; it feels really good to have others be kind to us. And, the research is clear, it feels just as good to be kind to others. When we go through the world guarded, jaded, and walled off to other people, we isolate ourselves from a source of happiness and wellbeing that we’d otherwise get to access. It might take a little practice, especially if you’ve been hurt by other people and feel the need to protect yourself, but making kindness a deliberate practice promises to yield great rewards in terms of happiness and general positivity. Being kind to others promotes good feelings in them, of course, but it also delivers us a powerful happiness boost. Beyond that, it has the potential to enrich and strengthen our relationships with others, allowing us to feel connected and supported—both of which are vital contributors to happiness.

3. Be in awe. This is one of my favorites. Recent research has shown that a regular experience of being in awe is associated with decreased rates of depression and anxiety. When we do, read about, witness, or otherwise experience things that make us feel a true sense of how awesome life can be, we make a significant contribution to our overall wellbeing. And this is something we can deliberately practice in an effort to generate those good vibrations. Go for a walk in nature; marvel at the intricacies of artwork or the architecture in your neighborhood; read about new scientific discoveries or human achievements; watch a newborn baby discover the world. As much and as often as you can, put yourself in a position to be in awe, and watch how much more easily happiness comes to you.

4. Affirm your worthiness. With so many messages telling us who we should be—the ones coming from the media, communicated silently by the people around us, or echoing in our own minds—we sometimes need to strive to remember that we are enough. Doing this for ourselves, intentionally and regularly, can boost our sense of self-confidence and increase our sense of contentment. To fold this into your happiness practice, regularly check in with how you’re thinking and feeling throughout the day. Whenever you find yourself caught in the web of comparing, criticizing, or cutting yourself down, repeat worthiness-boosting affirmations. You might say something like, “I am whole and complete, exactly as I am,” “I am worthy of love and connection,” “I am worthy of forgiveness, including my own,” or create your own affirmations that help you remember your worthiness. Watch your happiness meter rise.

5. Tune out. We already know that we live in a digital era, in which technology pervades every aspect of our lives. But as many advantages as this provides us, there are also some pretty considerable drawbacks to consider. The research is clear that if we aren’t mindful about how we engage online, we risk doing harm to our happiness. The more mindlessly we engage online, the less connected we feel to our actual lives. And this is worth adjusting, because as it turns out, mindfulness—the practice of deliberately connecting to our actual experience in the moment—is known to increase happiness. To harness happiness by tuning out, practice limiting your online engagement. Take social media fasts; dedicate time to going offline; cultivate your real-life relationships; limit your TV time, and try a new activity instead.

6. Drop in. Our waking hours are spent swimming through a stream of distractions that vie determinedly for our attention. From the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep, many of us are either busy doing something or thinking about the next thing we’ll do. But when we fill our days with work and obligations, constantly thinking about what’s next, we get tired. And often when we’re tired, we numb ourselves out in an effort to rest and disconnect. There’s nothing wrong with this, except that it often doesn’t work very well. Instead of feeling refreshed, we can feel even less energized. Worse, we can find ourselves lethargic, bored, or apathetic. Developing practices that connect us inward can help us increase our happiness as we learn to nurture and give to ourselves. Meditation is a remarkably effective tool for helping us turn inward and generate positive feelings. Exercise is another great way for us to practice connecting with ourselves and attuning to our mind and body. Journaling, another useful tool for hacking happiness, helps us to learn from the wisdom of our own free-flowing thoughts and let go of things in our minds that weigh us down and contribute negatively to our lives. Try incorporating one or all of these into your daily life, and enjoy the uptick in happiness that comes with it.

7. Get your hands dirty. One of the best ways to experience more happiness is to get in touch with our abundance, and helping others is a marvelous way to do this. Volunteering has been shown to boost our sense of contentment, gratitude, and overall wellbeing. But we don’t need to be Rockefellers to make this happen. When we contribute to others, in ways both large and small, we also contribute to our own happiness. Take some time to seek ways that you can get involved in your world and your life, and enjoy the bonus prize of a sizable boost in happiness.

8. Get your feet dirty, too. This final happiness hack is my personal favorite. I don’t know about you, but I have fond recollections of how fun and freeing it felt to be a child. Back when my responsibilities were few and my options felt limitless, happiness always seemed to be right at my fingertips. If you can relate to this, then you’ll be glad to know that engaging in play activities is one of the best ways to experience more happiness. Let loose, access your imagination, and be creative. And if you want to up-level your efforts to get happier through play, take the fun outdoors! Being in nature is an unparalleled mood-booster. Kick of your shoes, ground yourself in the earth, and soak up all the good vibes it has to share with you.

I hope these 8 simple hacks set you on the path toward inviting more happiness into your life. Got some happiness hacking tips of your own? Share them with me in the comments section below!